State of the Blog: UMHoops v3

If you’ve made it this far, you’re looking at the latest version of the website. The new design was long overdue and will hopefully be a much needed improvement. We’ve also moved to a new server which should mean less “Internal Server Error” and faster load times. You can obviously see the new design for yourself but here are some highlights worth pointing out:

Recruiting Profiles: We are replacing the hot boards with recruiting profiles. These profiles will have basic information about Michigan recruiting targets and also a listing of all previous posts tagged with that prospect’s name. The profiles are listed by class here: 2011 / 2012 / 2013.

Newsstand: A compilation of our favorite RSS feeds and tweets for the latest news across the college basketball world on one page.

Player Profile Pages: Updated statistics, season trends, and a listing of each player’s game-by-game bullets. Profiles can be accessed from the drop down menu above, the roster page, or the depth chart. Example: Zack Novak

There will obviously be some growing pains but we are confident that this will be a huge step toward taking the site to the next level. We will have significantly more content this year, mostly due to our new presence on press row, and want to try to make everything easier to find. If you do find an error or have a suggestion, please shoot me an e-mail.

We also are going to use this as an opportunity to start our semi-annual donation drive. We have put in a significant amount of work to try and improve the site over the last several months and think we’ve done a great job:

We acquired a press pass and added Joe to the team to make it worthwhile.

Finally, we put together this new design and added the features outlined above.

Unfortunately none of this is free. The best way to make all of this happen and help us continue to improve the site is to ask for your help. There’s no need for a monthly donation or anything like that but any donations are a huge boost to the site and allow us to continue to push the envelope. You can rest assured that your contribution will go directly toward the costs associated with the site. To contribute, click the button below: